Here's the latest reason they must be telling the truth about Iran and the need for a new war: they lied about the last one. That's right, according to the latest dispatch from the Associated Press,

"No one who has seen the files has suggested the evidence is thin. But senior officials – gun shy after the drubbing the administration took for the faulty intelligence leading to the 2003 Iraq invasion – were underwhelmed by the packaging."

See? It's just the "packaging." They've got solid proof, and they're even being extra careful in presenting it to us, because we were so hard on them last time. In fact, you can tell just how careful these senior officials are being from the fact that in all the articles in all the newspapers, so many of them (or is it all one guy?) are never identified by name.

And shockingly, according to one, possibly apocryphal, account, the Times has acknowledged that its reporter Michael Gordon is actually a voice-activated answering machine.

This is brought into doubt, however, by an Email exchange one reader had with Gordon this weekend, in which the apparently real reporter explained:

"I am well aware of the controversy over the WMD intel. I think this case is different. The US intelligence community is not on the outside looking in, as was the case with the WMD intel. The US is in Iraq and this largely reflects intelligence gathered on the battefield. At any rate, I spend some time talking to a range of officials on this issue and quoted the intel reports accurately." [sic]

So, you see? This case is DIFFERENT. This time we can TRUST
the "intelligence" sources. Because, last time, we'd merely had crews
of trained inspectors swarming the country for years, and they denied
that there were any WMD there. This time, we have amateurs observing
the situation in the middle of guerrilla warfare, and they say they've
got the goods but can't reveal them. So, you see, it's DIFFERENT.

The headline on the latest AP story (a story written by Katherine Shrader and Anne Gearan)
reads "U.S. Considers Proof About Iran: Government Weighs How Much to
Divulge About Iraq Connection." Shrader and Gearan assure us that
there is 200 pages of proof, but that sadly and inexplicably it's
classified. Of course, "No one who has seen the files has suggested
the evidence is thin." Another way to say this might be: "No one who
would suggest the evidence was thin has been permitted to see the
files." It sounds less impressive that way though.

Who has seen
the 200 pages? Well, Shrader and Gearan report that "officials from
several intelligence agencies scrutinized the presentation to make sure
it was clear and that 'we don't in any way jeopardize our sources and
methods in making the presentation,' State Department spokesman Sean
McCormack said." Now, does anyone recall any concerns that previous
presentations have been unclear? My memory suggests that the reason
for the "drubbing the administration took" was that they blatantly
lied, not that they wrote poorly. And, since when does one PR flack at
the State Department get to explain the concerns of several
intelligence agencies?

National Security Advisor Stephen
Hadley claims the White House is the reason for the delay in making
public the "proof," and he claims the White House is trying to get the
intelligence community (is it really a community?) to weaken, not
strengthen, its claims. However, the National Review reports:

"At
least twice in the past month, the White House has delayed a PowerPoint
presentation initially prepared by the military to detail evidence of
suspected Iranian materiel and financial support for militants in Iraq.
The presentation was to have been made at a press conference in Baghdad
in the first week of February. Officials have set no new date, but they
say it could be any day.

"Even as U.S. officials in Baghdad were
ready to make the case, administration principals in Washington who
were charged with vetting the PowerPoint dossier bowed to pressure from
the intelligence community and ordered that it be scrubbed again."

The
AP seems to agree that the "intelligence" services, not the White
House, caused the delay. Of course, we all would know this without
being told if we simply stopped to think for a moment. The AP article
says:

"Privately, officials say they want to avoid the kind of
gaffe akin to former Secretary of State Colin Powell's case for war
before the United Nations in 2003."

Well that's lovely, and it's
nice of them to make their "private" comments so… um, publicly. But do
they have no concern over avoiding the kind of "gaffe" President Bush
made in his 2002 speech in Cincinnati or on numerous television
appearances and in a memorable State of the Union address, or the kind
of "gaffes" that Cheney and Rice made over and over again to assure the
public and the Congress that Iraq had WMD and ties to 9-11? In other
words, has anybody noticed that the same people are still in charge who
lied us into the last war?

Now, Robert Gates is out and about
claiming that he's got serial numbers that amount to "pretty good"
proof of Iranian support for Iraqis. And someone has shown something
to select Congress Members, resulting in Joe Lieberman declaring "I'm
convinced from what I've seen that the Iranians are supplying and are
giving assistance to the people in Iraq who are killing American
soldiers." Lieberman, by the way, voted for the last war, and said
recently that he does not regret that vote, supports escalating the
war, and opposes setting any date by which to end it.

Among the things we have not fully looked into yet are, not only the way the White House sold the last warbut also the way the media lapped up those lies. As Gilbert Cranberg asked recently, "Why did the Associated Press
wait six months, when the body count began to rise, to distribute a
major piece by AP's Charles Hanley challenging Powell's evidence and
why did Hanley say how frustrating it had been until then to break
through the self-censorship imposed by his editors on negative news
about Iraq?"

More urgently, why – after the AP published a full debunking by Hanley of the last war's lies -- is the AP playing along with the new ones? Is this all part of
selling us on the idea that the old ones don't matter? It's likely to
have the effect of making them matter even more. The current display
of media credulity in the face of an absence of evidence is serving to
remind the public of how we got into the war in Iraq that continues and
worsens to this day.

But
let's keep one thing in mind as we demand a thorough investigation of
both sets of lies – lies made by the same set of people: In neither
case, even were every single claim 100 percent true and accurate, would
anyone have established a legal case for war. If a nation's possession
of WMDs were grounds for launching a war against it, the United States
would be subject to legal invasion immediately. So, while debunking
the fanciful claims of Bush, Cheney, and Gates may be entertaining, we
may actually do more good if we brush them aside and point out that it
does not matter whether their claims are true or not. Aiding a nation
in repelling a foreign occupation is not grounds for war. The U.S.
still brags about having done this in France 50 years ago. If Iran
were doing it in Iraq now, which no evidence yet suggests, the crime
would lie in the foreign invaders' refusal to leave, not in the aide
supplied by the Iranians.

More from this author:

U.S. v. Bush (7046 Hits) By David Swanson
Now, we almost all agree that Bush and Cheney have done bad things. But have they actually committed crimes? If you know...

Faulty Intelligen, PowerPoint Follies
Since there doesn't seem to be any way to stem the tide of faulty intelligence, we may as well adapt our strategy for halting a war on Iran to the worst case scenario.

Instead of a war game, let's have a peace game in which we brain-storm about how to stop war working under the assumption that Iran really is on its way to nukes and is supplying Iraqi militias with "the biggest bomb yet."

Regarding PowerPoint, I came across this quote in an Atlantic Monthly (http://www.theatlantic.com/doc...12/fallows) article by the great journalist James Fallows. He told former Iraq nuclear inspector David Kay how "cool" military charts done in PowerPoint looked, with "sweeping arrows indicating the rapid movement of men across terrain."

"'Yes, and the longer you've been around, the more you learn to be skeptical of the 'cool' factor in PowerPoint,' Kay said. 'I don't think the President had seen many charts like that before,' he added, referring to President Bush as he reviewed war plans for Iraq."

US propaganda ministry
The corporate media in the US is a propaganda machine. Why do media analysts insist on suggesting that the media are duped by administration lies? The media collaborates with these criminals in order to deliberately misinform the American public on a whole range of issues - war being among the more destructive.

If the corporate media were not a part of the US propaganda ministry, we would have less need for sites like this.